The opinions here expressed strictly are my own. I serve as senior advisor, economics, for American Principles in Action. I am editor-in-chief of thesupplyside.blogspot.com, and am, with Charles Kadlec, the author of "The 21st Century Gold Standard: For Prosperity, Security, and Liberty," available for free download in ebook form here. Charles Kadlec and I are co-editors of the Laissez Faire Books edition of Copernicus's Essay on Money.
I also authored "The Websters' Dictionary: how to use the Web to transform the world," which won the “Trophée du choix des Internauts” (“The People's Choice”) in the World e-Democracy Forum Awards, 2010, Paris, France. (Download a free and complete eBook version here.) I also manage The Gold Standard Facebook page.
I was a deputy general counsel in the Reagan White House; founded the Prosperity Caucus; and was a member of the original Supply Side movement.
I am proprietor of http://auntiesamwantsyou.com.
Follow me on Twitter @TheWebster.

10/31/2011 @ 4:52PM18,464 views

October Surprise: Can Gold Be The Panama Canal Treaty Of 2012?

Tax cuts, apart from Cain’s controversial 9-9-9, have not differentiated the contenders dramatically. All Republicans are campaigning against tax increases and campaigning for rate cuts. Perry is well positioned, with Forbes’s help, to bring the gold standard, and the elimination of federal taxes on gold to allow people to construct their own golden parachutes out of the deteriorating greenback, to the fore. Will Perry, in for a penny with the flat tax, go in for a pound…with gold?

Meanwhile Gingrich, playing the “tortoise” in this race has pulled ahead of Perry and into third place in the two most recent polls — Fox and CBS News/NY Times. And Gingrich is a famously shrewd strategist—and interpreter of polls. Gingrich is well equipped to register the full implications of Rasmussen’s October Surprise – maybe even this cycle’s version of the Panama Canal Treaty — and to exploit it.

Whoever digs down into the crosstabs will discover another electorally important fact. The gold standard, potentially key to energizing caucus and primary voters, is an asset for the general. This isn’t a desperate primary season expedient which can return to haunt. Rasmussen: “The majority of voters across nearly all demographic groups favor the gold standard if it would dramatically reduce the power of central bankers and political leaders over the economy.” A majority of African Americans, most of them enthusiastically, support the gold standard. A majority of Union members (including this columnist, a member of the AFL-CIO) support the gold standard too.

Gold splits the Democrats’ base There are two major elements of the left. One is made up of elitist, doctrinaire, souls such as Paul Krugman. These are almost all white males of the privileged class: its patriarchy. These, the left’s nomenklatura, almost all ridicule gold. They also, not surprisingly, are a minuscule minority…even of the left.

The nomenklatura have the prestigious platforms –- media, academic perches, money, prestige awards. But they don’t have the votes. Most of the left is made up of humanitarian populists, such as organized labor and ethnics who comprise the “social democratic” left. They are far more concerned about jobs, opportunity, and policies of “rising tide” prosperity than with arcane (and dubious) neo-Keynesian dogma. These — as the Occupy movement is telling us loudly with its many calls for the gold standard — and as Rasmussen now has quantified in his October Surprise — strongly tend to favor gold. The ethnic and labor left leadership is more attuned to the mood of their own, pro-gold, rank and file than are the patrician nomenklatura.

Neither Mr. Bush nor Mr. Obama adopted the kind of economic policies designed to create a robust economy and the jobs that come with that. The Republicans for years have been calling (correctly so) for tax rate cuts and the Democrats have grudgingly gone along, but the jobs do not come. Why not? As compellingly pointed out by Forbes.com’s own John Tamny: the villain isrotten monetary policy.

The gold standard is the, well, gold standard of monetary policy. As noted enthusiastically by The New York Sun and by my colleague Rich Danker in Forbes.com a recipe for how to get there has been laid upon the table by Lewis Lehrman, chairman of the Lehrman Institute (whose website this columnist edits).

Will one or more of the GOP candidates read Rasmussen’s report, parse the implications, consult the gold standard experts, and upset this race? Many gold standard savants are being snapped up: Forbes, now a Perry advisor; Jim Grant, Ron Paul’s announced pick for Fed Chairman; Forbes.com columnist and my co-author of a booklet on the gold standard, Charles Kadlec, a Herman Cain advisor. World-class gold cognoscenti remain, at last report, unpledged, including Lehrman, Sean Fieler (investor and philanthropist who chairs the nonprofit pro-gold American Principles Project which this columnist advises professionally), Atlas Foundation’s Judy Shelton and Professor (and Forbes.com columnist) Brian Domitrovic, among them. The intellectual infrastructure for gold – the knowhow — is there.

If the candidates take notice Scott Rasmussen, bless his subversive little heart, may have changed the course of this race…and of history. Gold presents as the most powerful unexploited economic issue waiting to enter, and alter, this presidential election cycle.

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